Word: kurtzman
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...Jules Feiffer Little Nemo in Slumberland Richard Corliss: Harvey Kurtzman TIME: Al Feldstein TIME: Peanuts in the Gallery Masters of American Comics The Spirit Archives ABSOLUTELY...
...Many comics artists, including Kurtzman and much of the Mad gang, had been schooled in fine art before turning to the strips. Some, like Will Elder, Kurtzman's loopiest cartoonist, and Al Feldstein, the mastermind of EC's horror and science fiction comics before becoming editor of Mad in 1956, have turned to more respectable forms of watercolors - what could easily be recognized as art, if not great art - in their twilight years. But in their prime, when Elder and Feldstein (and Herriman and Segar and King) were doing their most vigorous work, sending out comic distress signals under...
...stop the history tour here, in part because I've written about Kurtzman and EC comics at length on this site, in part because Andrew Arnold has written with a scholar's eloquence and a fan's passion on the later artists in the Masters of American Comics show...
...akin to the argument that tries to make movies art by defining them as pictures seen on a wall (museum pieces) rather than illustrated stories. Yet Ingmar Bergman and Preston Sturges, to name just two great "directors," are primarily not visual stylists but writers. Similarly, Kurtzman and Spiegelman are remarkable less for their draftsmanship than for conjuring a world and giving it narrative shape, density and bite. You don't see their work so much as you read...
...that raises my last quibble about the museuming of comics. Many of the artists included as writers more than "directors." Put it this way: would you rather see (read) Kurtzman's Mad or Spiegelman's Maus illustrated by other artists, or have others write stories for which Kurtzman and Spiegelman provided the drawings? The first, obviously, because the genius was in the writing. Indeed, though Kurtzman and Feldstein did their own drawing for some EC comic covers and stories, most were illustrated by terrific artists (Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis) who brought their own personalities to the equation. At Marvel...